Just about the time that you think that the bureaucratic bungling of allocating governmental relief funds for New Orleans cannot be topped, another story appears to top the previous one:

In a hurricane-ravaged city desperately lacking health services for the poor, the primary-care clinics that arrived in New Orleans last summer looked to be just what the doctor ordered.
The six double-wide trailers from FEMA, each equipped with eight exam rooms, were supposed to be strategically deployed around the city and provide checkups and other nonemergency health services for the city’s poor and uninsured.
But nearly nine months after they were first delivered, the trailers are still in the parking lot of University Hospital waiting to be deployed, and Louisiana State University officials are angrily asking how the seemingly simple process of bringing them into service got delayed by red tape and political foot-dragging. [. . .]
LSU hospital officials began planning for a temporary network of neighborhood clinics in early November 2005, barely two months after Hurricane Katrina knocked Charity Hospital out of commission and threw health-care services for many of the city’s uninsured into disarray.
Eight months later, in late June and early July, FEMA delivered the trailers to New Orleans, with the $761,000 bill picked up by the federal government.
It wasn’t until last week that the New Orleans City Council agreed to temporarily waive the city’s zoning code to allow the trailers to be located at six schools around the city — three on the east bank and three in Algiers — for two years.
In between fell more than 100 meetings and dozens of e-mails about the issue involving LSU executives and officials at the city, state and federal levels. And the journey is not over. The zoning waivers still need approval from Mayor Ray Nagin, which cannot occur until next week at the earliest, as well as permits from the city that could take up to six months to acquire.
Donald Smithburg, who heads LSU’s hospitals division, said university officials have stood ready to operate the clinics — each of which require one doctor, two nurses and administrative staff — since last summer, which is when LSU officials first approached the City Council about a zoning change for the clinics.
He said he was flummoxed by the continued delays. “It’s been a procedural mystery as to how we get these trailers placed,” Smithburg said.

Read the entire sordid tale.